One item that I think I see missing from this list is what you might call “ritual”—agreed-upon ways of knowing what to do in a given context that two members of an organization can have shared mental models of, whether or not they’ve worked together in the past. This allows you to scale trust by reducing the amount of trust needed to handle the same amount of ambiguity, at some loss of flexibility.
For example, when I was at McKinsey, calling a meeting a “problem solving” as opposed to a “status update” or a “steerco” would invoke three distinct sets of behaviors and expectations. As a result, each participant had some sense of what other participants might by-default expect the meeting to feel like and be, and so even if participants hadn’t worked much with each other in the past, they could know how to act in a trust-building way in that meeting context. The flip side is that if the meeting needed something very different from the normal behaviors, it became slightly harder to break out of the default mode.
One item that I think I see missing from this list is what you might call “ritual”—agreed-upon ways of knowing what to do in a given context that two members of an organization can have shared mental models of, whether or not they’ve worked together in the past. This allows you to scale trust by reducing the amount of trust needed to handle the same amount of ambiguity, at some loss of flexibility.
For example, when I was at McKinsey, calling a meeting a “problem solving” as opposed to a “status update” or a “steerco” would invoke three distinct sets of behaviors and expectations. As a result, each participant had some sense of what other participants might by-default expect the meeting to feel like and be, and so even if participants hadn’t worked much with each other in the past, they could know how to act in a trust-building way in that meeting context. The flip side is that if the meeting needed something very different from the normal behaviors, it became slightly harder to break out of the default mode.